Hitting
the BooksHow much do college students study?By Myrna DeVries Anderson '00

There is evidence aplenty
at Calvin of students who are working hard, students who are hardly
working and students who are just getting by.

“Wherefore let every Man look after his Homework; what he hath
to do at Home,” reads the first citation of the word homework
in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

In 1683, when that sentence was written, homework was quite simply work
done at home—not at a factory. If the word is updated to its current
meaning (the first recorded usage of which occurs in the 1889 OED) the
17th century sentence stands as a wise admonition, which still requires
an updated understanding of gender. The gals must needs hit the books
as diligently as the guys.

But how often? The gold standard, passed from generations of hopeful
professors to their stunned students, is unvarying: “Two to three
hours outside of class for every hour spent inside of class,” quoth
Jan Heerspink, a counselor in Calvin’s Student Academic Services
office (SAS). For the student carrying a full course load, that adds up
to 25 to 30 hours of homework a week. “That’s not to say a
lot of students are doing it,” she added.

National Numbers
The 2002 National
Study of Student Engagement (NSSE), a project of the University of
Indiana at Bloomington, showed just how egregiously the nation’s
college students have departed from the gold standard. The NSSE questioned
first-year students and seniors at 366 colleges and universities (Calvin
did not participate) about every facet of their learning environments,
including study habits.

When asked how much time they spent weekly preparing for class, defined
as “studying, reading, writing, rehearsing, and other activities,”
only 10 percent of the first-year students at four-year liberal arts colleges
reported studying 26 to 30 hours. The largest percentage (19 percent)
confessed to homework-ing a paltry six to 10 hours. Eighteen percent study
11 to 15 hours; another 18 percent study 16 to 20 hours. Fifteen percent
study 21 to 25 hours. Eleven percent spend only one to five hours a week
on homework in all its permutations. The smallest number of first-year
students, 8 percent, really put in the hours—30 or more.

Asked the same question, seniors at the same institutions show even less
impressive numbers. Again, only 10 percent of respondents spend 26 to
30 hours at their desks, in the lab or in the rehearsal hall. The largest
number of seniors, 21 percent, spend only six to 10 hours on homework.
Eighteen percent study 11 to 15 hours; seventeen percent spend 16 to 20
hours. Thirteen percent work 21 to 25 hours. Ten percent really grind
away, spending 30-plus hours on homework.

First-year students and seniors are not slacking alone, however. Dr.
John Hayek, assistant director of the NSSE, cited another study from Indiana
University, the College Student’s Experience Questionnaire, which
covers all college class levels. “A little less than two-thirds
of all students spend 15 hours or less preparing for class. That number
is pretty consistent across the board with national numbers,” he
said.

Calvin’s Data Calvin’s
homework data, what there is of it, does show a similar disregard for
the 2:1 rule. Only the college’s seniors—approximately 300
of them—took part in 2002 College Student Survey, administered by
the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA. On average, according
to HERI, Calvin seniors study a mere 13 hours per week. The nearly-graduated
at Knollcrest have not erred as greatly, however, as those at other four-year
institutions, who study only 10 hours a week.

Numbers might lie or otherwise come athwart of the truth, but there is
evidence aplenty at Calvin of students who are working hard, students
who are hardly working and students who are just getting by. As SAS director
Jim MacKenzie said: “You hear stories.”

There is the story of first-year physics major Alexis Reynolds, who is
juggling two classes in her concentration with Greek and speech. “Probably,
like, five or six hours a night and then even more on weekends,”
she hazarded about her studying regimen. “I have a lot of work.”
Reynolds, of Wynnewood, Pa., put her study-hours-per-week tally at 36,
adding, “I should do more.”

In his role as director of Calvin’s honors program, Ken Bratt sees
a lot of students like Reynolds, those who study 30 or more—some
many more—hours a week. “These are certainly hard-working
kids. They’re looking for an extra challenge. Some of them are driven
and overworking. On the other hand, a lot of them aspire to graduate schools
and professional schools, and they know this is what it’s going
to be like in a couple of years.” Fifty-five students who walked
last May, a full seven percent of the 2002 graduating class, wore honors
medallions.

A sophomore psychology major tells the story of a different kind of student.
She made the Dean’s List for the last three semesters, while spending
only two to three hours a week at her books. “I try to get things
done pretty fast. I don’t procrastinate. I get it done and don’t
worry about it,” she offered by way of explanation.

Senior communications major Beth Gunnink, of Kanata, Ont., said she works
about two hours a day and more on weekends to land in the 12 to 15 hour
bracket and on the Dean’s List with regularity. “If you factor
in rehearsal hours, it would go up a lot,” said Gunnink, who performed
two roles in Calvin’s spring production of Emma.

Calvin students find a lot of ways to lighten the 25 to 30 hour workload,
but those who do five or less hours of studying a night have a favorite
homework-reduction strategy: They don’t do the reading. “I
won’t read the books or the texts I have to until I take the test—which
works. It works!” claimed an unidentified mass media major who makes
Bs and Cs in his classes.

Karin Maag gives a history
lecture outside.

The also anonymous psychology major also avoids the drudgery of daily
readings: “You learn which classes you have to do the reading for
and which classes you don’t have to do the readings for,”
she said of the strategy.

“It’s a procrastination habit for sure,” said Heerspink,
who manages the tutoring program at Calvin and teaches “College
Thinking and Learning,” a class in study strategies. “It’s
also the assumption that you’ll read something once, and you’ll
get it, and that’s not true for most of us. … They’re
shortchanging themselves. A lot of students think they can study the night
before the test, and that’s it. They’ve got to be learning
this stuff all along. There’s just too much material to succeed
in college that way … and it’s too big and deep and connected.”

Heerspink commented on the Calvin population’s widely varying study
habits: “I think it’s a mixed bag partly because we admit
a real mixed bag of students. We have some top scholars here, and we also
have students who had a tough, tough time in high school. We take them
in and give them a try. There are fabulous pockets of students who are
really helping each other. It’s really a place where students are
expected to be students.”

Homework History If Calvin students
are not honoring the homework standard now, was there a time in the dim
memory of the college when they did? Dr. George Harper, English professor
emeritus, whose college career was interrupted when he joined the army
in 1942, remembered: “Right after the war, you had to fight to find
a place in the library. It was too full.”

Even for Harper and his hard-working ilk, the quality of all that homework
was different. “Most of that was not assigned work. It was reading
lots of good stuff because the prof expected you to. … I don’t
think we had as much busy work as students have today. There were no photocopiers,
and there were no computers. Today professors hand out a lot of paper.
It was a different world.”

To hear Joy DeBoer Anema ’65 tell it, to be a student on the Franklin
campus in the early 1960s was to be a part of a community where homework
took on the nature of a ritual. Anema, Calvin’s associate registrar
for academic advising, recalled: “Our habits were to go over to
the library after supper at five-thirty, six o’clock. Everybody
took a coffee break at nine or nine-thirty. The library emptied out.”
Following coffee at the commons, the Franklin community, thus far co-ed,
made a division. Female students, who were required to be “in”
at 10 p.m., repaired to their dorms or the “coops” (residences
on Franklin) to burn the oil until midnight. But while the women hit the
books, it seems, the men hit the campus.

“After 10 o’clock, it would be screw-around time, basically,”
said professor of education Leroy Stegink ’65, of his gender’s
study habits in that era. “Some would study. … Some would
raise whoopee.”

Standing FirmPlus ca change…Perhaps,
as an article in the December 6, 2002, issue of the Chronicle of Higher
Education suggests, the 2:1 homework-class work ratio is and always
has been too impractical an ideal. “Perhaps a more realistic response
is to simply lower expectations, so that they more closely comport with
campus reality,” wrote Jeffrey Young, the article’s author.

The stalwarts in Calvin’s SAS office are holding the line. “We
counsel them that if you want to be a serious student at Calvin, you have
to consider it a full-time job,” said MacKenzie. While acknowledging
that there are a lot of distractions—social, athletic, extracurricular—pulling
at students of all grade levels, he had a counter-argument. “Our
tagline is Minds in the Making.
That doesn’t put down other things in a college education, but the
curriculum at Calvin is a demanding curriculum; and for a student to be
successful here, they have to be serious about their studies.”

At this writing, Calvin is participating in the latest NSSE, anticipating
a late summer or fall report card on its homework habits. “I really
lobbied to get us to take part in this because I hope our scores are very
good,” said Claudia Beversluis, the college’s dean of instruction.
Beversluis believes the homework issue will raise issues of not only how
much to study, but how best to teach. “I want to increase the rigor
and engagement, but in a way that works for students here,” she
said.